In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson, II

Pardon the double dip, but I can’t help it. This passage is from much later in the book, when he has arrived at Alice Springs after a long pass through remote country:

Because it is so bang in the middle of nowhere, Alice Springs ought to seem a miracle—an actual town with department stores and schools and streets with names—and for a long time it was sort of an antipodean Timbuktu, a place tantalizing in its inaccessibility. In 1954, when Alan Moorehead passed through, Alice’s only regular connection to the outside world was a weekly train from Adelaide. Its arrival on Saturday evening was the biggest event in the life of the town. It brough mail, newspapers, new pictures for the cinema, long-awaited spare parts, and whatever else couldn’t be acquired locally. Nearly the whole town turned out to see who got off and what was unloaded.

In those days Alice had a population of 4,000 and hardly any visitors. Today it’s a thriving little city with a population of 25,000 and it is full of visitors—350,000 of them a year—which is of course the whole problem.These days you can jet in from Adelaide in two hours, from Melbourne to Sydney in less than three. You can have a latte and buy some opals and then climb on a tour bus and travel down the highway to Ayers Rock. It has not only become accessible, it’s become a destination. It’s so full of hotels, motels, conference centers, campgrounds, and desert resorts that you can’t pretend even for a moment that you have achieved something exceptional by getting yourself there. It’s crazy really. A community that was once famous for being remote now attracts thousands of visitors who come to see how remote it no longer is.

In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson, I

Bryson’s hilarious and brilliant book about Australia. Just a piece from early on in which he sells what makes this country/continent so remarkable:
I have a story about a little bug called Nothomyrmecia macrops that I think illustrates perfectly, if a little obliquely, what an exceptional country this is. It’s a slightly involved tale but a good one, so bear with me.

In 1931 on the Cape Arid peninsula in Western Australia, some amateur naturalists were poking about in the scrubby wastes when they found an insect none had ever seen before. It looked vaguely like an ant, but was an unusual pale yellow and had strange, staring, distinctly unsettling eyes. Some specimens were collected and these found their way to the desk of an expert at the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, who identified the insect at once as Nothomyrmecia. The discovery caused great excitement because, as far as anyone knew, nothing like it had existed on earth for a hundred million years. Nothomyrmecia was a proto-ant, a living relic from a time when ants were evolving from wasps. In entomological terms, it was extraordinary, as if someone had found a herd of triceratops grazing on some distant grassy plain.

As expedition was organized at once, but despite the most scrupulous searching, no one could find the Cape Arid colony. Subsequent searches came up equally empty-handed. Almost half a century later, when word got out that a team of American scientists was planning to search for the ant, almost certainly with the kind of high-tech gadgetry that would make the Australians look amateurish and underorganized, government scientists decided to make one final, preemptive effort to find the ants alive. So a party of them set out in a convoy across the country.

On the second day out, while driving across the South Australia desert, one of their vehicles began to smoke and sputter, and they were forced to make an unscheduled overnight stop at a lonely pause in the highway called Poochera. During the evening one of the scientists, a man named Bob Taylor, stepped out for a breath of air and idly played his flashlight over the surrounding terrain. You may imagine his astonishment when he discovered, crawling over the trunk of a eucalyptus beside their campsite, a thriving colony of none other than Nothomyrmecia.

Now consider the possibilities. Taylor and his colleagues were eight hundred miles from their intended search site. In the almost 3 million square miles of emptiness that is Australia, one of the handful of people able to identify it had just found one of the rarest, most sought-after insects on earth—an insect seen alive just once, almost half a century earlier—and all because their van had broken down where it did. Nothomyrmecia, incidentally, has still never been found at its original site.

You take my point again, I’m sure. This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. Stuff yet to be found.

Trust me, this is an interesting place.

Panama, by Thomas McGuane

McGuane prose is a strange kind of kicky poetry, and usually great. The narrator in Panama is an on-the-downhill rocker who is living in Key West and trying to get back with his old lady, Catherine. In this passage he catches up to her in a grocery store, and a fight ensues:

Slapping me, crying, yelling, oh God, clerks peering. I said `You’re prettiest like this.” She chunks a good one into my jaw. The groceries were on the floor. Someone was saying `Ma’am? Ma’am?” My tortoiseshell glasses from Optique Boutique were askew and some blood was in evidence. My lust for escape was complete. Palm fronds beat against the air conditioned thermopane windows like my own hands.

Two clerks were helping Catherine to the door. I think they knew. Mrs. Fernandez, the store manager, stood by me.

`Can I use the crapper?’ I asked.

She stared at me coolly and said `First aisle past poultry.’

I stood on the toilet and looked out at my nation through the ventilator fan. Any minute now, Catherine Clay, the beautiful South Carolina wild child, would appear shortcutting her way home with her groceries.

I heard her before I could see her. She wasn’t breathing right. That scene in the aisles had been too much for her and her esophagus was constricted. She came into my view and in a very deep and penetrating voice I told her that I still loved her, terrifying myself that it might not be a sham, that quite apart from my ability to abandon myself to any given moment, I might in fact still be in love with this crafty, amazing woman who looked up in astonisment. I let her catch a glimpse of me in the ventilator hole before pulling the bead chain so that I vanished behind the dusty accelerating blades, a very effective slow dissolve.